The Forgetful Angel
by GMontag
Summary: When Artemis was young, Holly was always the invisible angel at his shoulder, keeping him safe and prodding him onto a better path. Maybe someday, he will have a chance to return the favor.
1. Do Angels Ever Forget?

**A/N:** Hi, I'm back. This is a new story, completely separate from any previous work of mine, and in a pretty different style, where the story will be told out of chronological order. Leave some feedback about it! As always, Artemis Fowl belongs to Eoin Colfer.

* * *

Prologue - Do angels ever forget?

* * *

 _ **'Angel' is the name of their office, not of their nature. If you seek the name of their nature, it is 'spirit'; if you seek the name of their office, it is 'angel': from what they are, 'spirit', from what they do, 'angel.' - St. Augustine**_

* * *

Angeline Fowl knelt next to the bed with a large book of prayers open on top of the covers.

"Angel of God," she began, touching the words on the page.

"My guardian dear," continued her son next to her, his eyes closed. He had memorized nearly all the prayers in there weeks ago.

Angeline glanced over at her son and the corners of her mouth lifted up in a small smile despite herself.

"To Whom His love," she read.

"Commits me here"

"Ever this day"

"Be at my side"

"To light and guard"

"To rule and guide"

"Amen."

Angeline closed the book and set it on the bed. Turning, she gave young Artemis a warm hug and a quick kiss on the forehead before he pulled himself up onto the low bed and wormed his way into the covers. The woman pulled the covers tight over Artemis.

Artemis Fowl had a contemplative look in his eyes though, one that maybe seemed a little off for a two-and-a-half year-old.

"Mommy," he asked after a moment, "there are so many people to care about, and so many things to do. Would our guardian angels ever get too busy and forget about us?"

"No," said Angeline, smiling at her son, "I don't think so. I think if an angel is assigned to us, God gives him all the time in the world to help us."

Artemis seemed to think about that for a bit.

"Good," he declared.

His mother couldn't tell if he was thinking about anyone or anything in particular.

"Good night, Mommy."

Angeline rose and turned to flick the lights off.

"Good night, Arty," she said softly. "Maybe dream of your guardian angel."


	2. The End

_**I should have been there years ago, but at the time, it seemed so easy to put it off, and to forget how short-lived humans were.**_

* * *

It felt like an unwritten rule that heroes deserved to die heroic deaths. Maybe throwing themselves on a grenade to save their squad. Maybe rushing through a flaming building to get the last orphan out. Or at least if they did survive to old age, then they got to pass while surrounded by their loved ones - their children, their grandchildren, maybe a spouse.

Heroes are supposed to have a _fitting_ death.

Maybe Artemis Fowl the Second was not a hero.

Artemis Fowl was killed in a car accident going from Logan Airport into Cambridge, the night of St. Patrick's Day. A young woman had drank more than a little too much, but insisted to her friends that her honors college education meant that she had enough intelligence and good judgement about her to drive the five miles back home. She'd had a spotless driving record, and with the number of sensors and automatic overrides that existed in cars these days, accidents seemed like a thing of the past.

Artemis' death certificate put him at forty-seven years old.

The elf, Holly Short, saw his casket from above and a ways away, standing, as she was, in the branches of the tree behind the mourners. She wept silently, with little sobs shaking her small frame, and big droplets of tears rolling down her tanned cheeks. She wore the white silk gown traditional to Elfin recycling ceremonies - the one she had worn most recently to Commander Root's recycling, three decades ago - though none of the humans saw her.

She still stood there well after the funeral was over, when the mourners had already begun to disperse. It was a large crowd, probably bolstered by a number of professional colleagues of Artemis'. If her hands had not been covering her face at the time, she might have noticed when Butler walked up to the tree.

"Fairy," the young woman called, her piercing brown eyes looking directly at Holly's shielded form. She looked familiar to the elf.

Holly unshielded.

Ramona Butler nodded in recognition when she saw her standing in the tree.

"Holly," she said, looking the elf in the eye now, "it's been a long time. Is it too cliché to say that I was expecting you?" Butler smiled, but it didn't quite reach her eyes.

"Ramona," greeted the elf, wiping her eyes and nodding at the woman as she briefly activated her wings and floated to the ground.

Butler towered over Holly, such that only the lowest button of her open black overcoat was at the elf's eye level. Her hands were hidden just inside a pair of wide sleeves, doubtless with easy access to at least half a dozen weapons of varying degrees of lethality. She'd inherited some of her mother's already-mixed Eurasian features - mostly in her thin face and long black hair - but also had some Latin genes hitherto unknown to the Butler line, making it even more difficult for strangers to pick out her origin.

Holly had a vague memory of seeing this Butler sprint past the background of a hologram call she'd had with Artemis some time ago, back when the woman was maybe a preteen. She'd heard an irate-sounding Juliet pronounce her daughter's full name in the way that only a parent does when something very bad was going to happen to their child. Humans grew up so fast. Ramona looked nothing like the child that Holly remembered, and appeared as if she had doubled in height. Could it really have been that long ago?

But no matter what time, the Butlers always did have an uncanny ability to pick out the shimmers in the air that hid shielded fairies.

"Thank you for coming," Butler said, "I know Artemis would have appreciated it."

Holly dipped her head again slightly, but looked away. What was the use in his appreciation now? She'd had decades to visit before.

"Good thing I found you," the woman said, quickly looking around to make sure the few remaining people were preoccupied, and that the tree mostly covered them before crouching a little to get closer to the elf's height. She reached into a deep pocket in her dark coat and pulled out a thin white envelope. "Mr. Fowl left something for you."

Holly took the envelope silently, feeling it and realizing that it wasn't completely flat. There was an old-fashioned wax seal on it, imprinted with the Fowl family crest. Inside, it felt like there was a small object, maybe the size of a coin. It was hard through the paper, and resolved into a circle when she rubbed her fingers against it.

"Thanks," muttered the elf.

"No problem," replied Butler, straightening up again, and sweeping her hands down to smooth the wrinkles on her coat. "I hope it means something to you, whatever it is. Though, knowing Mr. Fowl…" she trailed off, and had a faraway look in her eyes. "You must have known that he didn't have many friends."

Holly nodded mutely. She didn't know exactly, but it fit. Probably a good number of the people here weren't actually all that close to Artemis, but were touched by him or his work in some way. She looked off behind Butler, past the tree to the curbside, where an tall man opened a car door for a shorter, solemnly-dressed woman whose hair flowed down from her black beret to the middle of her back in golden ringlets. The woman disappeared into the car and there was a light thump as the car door closed.

"I'd best be going," said Butler, glancing at the smattering of remaining people. Holly wasn't sure who her principal was, though she would have guessed it had previously been Artemis.

"I'm glad to have finally met you, Holly. I only wish it'd be under better circumstances."

"I… I'm sorry for your loss," Holly said finally. She said it so quietly that she wasn't even sure if she'd just thought it, or actually vocalized it.

"Me too, Detective… me too. Artemis was a good man."

It was sometime after everyone had left that Holly found herself - shielded - in front of the grave marker, the top of which stood just below eye level for her.

"Hey, Arty," she whispered, letting go of a long breath, and wiping away a teardrop that had reached her chin.

She wanted to say how much she wished she had come up to visit him more, or at least talked to him more when he was still around. Part of her was already giving excuses for why she didn't: increased restrictions on surface travel, an influx of cases to the private detective practice, court and council appearances to try to convict this criminal and justify that action…

Truth was, fairies just had very long lives. Years to a human passed like days to the People. A few months, a few years of absence wasn't very much at all between friends underground. Life just moved at very different paces for Artemis Fowl and Holly Short.

Now that she thought about it, Holly realized that their communication must have seemed extremely sparse to Artemis after his teenage years. It wasn't that the world had become a calmer place, it was more that the various bits of excitement in the world never really brought the two of them together quite as much in the subsequent years.

Holly had forgotten how short-lived humans were.

Holly sat down, with her knees up in front of her, despite the streaks of dirt that would now rub onto her white gown. She didn't think Artemis would have minded. A light misting of rain came down. If not for the circumstances, it was something Holly would have enjoyed. It wasn't often she got out to the surface these days, and even when she did, rain was an even rarer treat.

"Hey Arty," she repeated. "I'll miss you."

In this rain, a keen observer might have just been able to see a hole in the sparse droplets that came down in the space before the tombstone, shaped like a sitting child with a child-sized set of wings, with her head bowed down, and her arms wrapped around her knees.


	3. Personal Entanglements

_**I thought it was natural that he would turn to me. We had a connection, you see - child prodigies bound by fate to share in the secret of the hidden world below us.**_

* * *

 _Twenty-three years before the death of Artemis Fowl._

Professor Paradizo was a chalk-and-talk kind of lecturer, an increasingly rare sort in the age of PowerPoint. She currently stood in front of an old lecture hall in Building 35 of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the elevated and steeply-sloped seating section before her almost made it appear as if she was looking up at a wall composed of her audience and their red-backed chairs.

"As we discussed last time, when extremely-low-probability space-time warps occur, a tachyon emission occurs. Emissions of such particles would send them simultaneously into the past and to the future."

She quickly drew a pair of plot axes on the board.

"These emissions can give us information about a warp event before it occurs."

She began filling in the plot with a set of elegant curves in yellow chalk. The curves traced around and around the confines of the plot, drawing out a pair of connected diagonal spirals that resembled butterfly wings.

"In the classical Lorenz system," she said as she continued to trace the contours of the plot, "we can get a reading here." The professor pointed at a seemingly random location on the left spiral. "But we do not know where the corresponding warp will appear. Current measurement precision and dynamical models generally only limit a detectable emission to a warp that would occur somewhere within about thirty light years and the next five millennia. In other words, we know something big is going to happen, but we have no way of pinning down where or when it will happen. This makes the technique slightly less useful than a crystal ball."

A smattering of chuckles sounded from the audience.

Minerva was about to continue when a motion in the back of the room caught her eye. A dark-haired man in an impeccably fitted, black Armani suit quietly closed the door behind himself as he came in, sliding gracefully into a chair off to the side.

Her eyes widened a bit in surprise, and she paused, staring a bit longer than she had intended. The man smiled, and she could have sworn she saw him wink at her.

 _'You sure have interesting timing…'_ she mused to herself as she swept her eyes back to the rest of the classroom and got back to the subject.

"We were stuck with this crystal ball gazing - making grand claims without any serious precision - until the Paradizo-Fowl method was developed." Though tempting, she decided not to immediately draw attention to the man who had arrived late to her talk. Instead, she started drawing another plot to the right of the first one.

"It is a method that allows us to transform what we see in the usual phase space into a much more tightly constrained set of space-time coordinates." Minerva swept a series of arrows over from the first plot to the second, but though they started out in different places on the left, they ended up at the same point on the right.

"Instead of light-years and millennia, we now can pin these warps down to meters and seconds."

She paused to let that sink in. Meters and seconds - that's how accurate she and Artemis had independently gotten the demon appearances before the Hybras landing down to.

"In case you were wondering," she said with a smirk, "while the Paradizo-Fowl method was simultaneously discovered by Dr. Artemis Fowl and myself, we came to an agreement about the naming of it after realizing that the alternative name of Fowl-Paradizo could be construed in an unfortunate way in English."

There was another bit of laughter in the audience.

"But perhaps," she said with a sigh, "in some ways it is still unfortunately named, since I am French, and we flip our nouns and adjectives compared to the English. There may be a lesson in there about how you choose to win your battles."

* * *

"What is it that you say in English? 'Fancy seeing you here?'"

Minerva reached forward to give Artemis Fowl a light hug, and a brief kiss on each cheek. Age had filled out Artemis somewhat. He stood a few inches taller than Minerva, and was slightly more broad-shouldered than he had been as a teenager. Some things didn't change though. His skin remained pasty-white, and his raven hair was still neatly combed back as always. Both eyes appeared blue though. Minerva remembered when he had taken to wearing contact lenses in public to avoid the extra attention.

Fowl smiled and shrugged his shoulders a little.

"I happened to be at a conference on the other end of campus, and just remembered you were here on sabbatical."

The professor rolled her eyes. Rare was the day that Artemis Fowl "just remembered" anything.

"I may have also come by to chat about something else," admitted Artemis more seriously. "Perhaps we can talk over lunch?"

Minerva grinned mischievously.

"Is that a date then, Dr. Fowl?" she asked, lowering her head and batting her eyelashes quickly.

Artemis froze. Highest tested IQ in Europe or not, he was still at a loss at that one.

Minerva laughed. "Je plaisante, mon cher. You are far too amusing. Yes, lunch, my treat."

She pulled her bag over her shoulder and smiled at the Irishman as she gestured towards the door.

"Shall we?"

* * *

Space-time magic, it seemed, was really mostly just about probabilities. Minerva Paradizo knew that it was possible for wormholes to simply appear, seemingly out of nowhere. She had spent a good amount of time hunting them down when she was looking to capture a demon. Physics said it was absurdly, terribly unlikely that such a thing would happen, but powerful fairy warlocks seemed to be able to reach out to the extreme ends of the probabilities and pluck an event out into existence. Hence, teleportation, time travel, and maybe even healing.

It would have probably helped if she had simply asked a warlock about such magic, but Minerva had the feeling that she wasn't the People's favorite Mud Woman, and even if she was, they probably wouldn't have told her anyway. She also had some suspicion that the People didn't quite understand the magic themselves, or else - peace-loving races or not - it would have been fairies, and not humans, who ruled the surface of the Earth.

So as it was, Minerva had worked for a number of years now, trying to blur the line between science and magic. It was just such a pity that the major verification of the work that she and Artemis had done - the prediction of demon appearances before the return of Hybras - had to be presented to the scientific community as pure theory, to avoid any mention of the People.

At the moment though, Minerva was more focused on working on her coffee, which was a light brown affair: three sugars, two milks, and a palm tree pattern made of foam on the surface up until about a minute ago.

Lunch had occurred at The Miracle of Science, a small establishment a few blocks north of the main campus of the Institute. The pair took seats by the west window, through which the traffic on Massachusetts Avenue could be seen whizzing by. A waitress had just cleared away their plates, leaving each person with just a drink.

"You are proposing that we detect disasters _in their natural_ timelines by their tachyon bursts." Minerva fixed Fowl with a stare, which Artemis returned evenly.

"Mass deaths, to be more precise," said the man. "My calculations show that the death of a lifeform in a timeline _should_ produce a small tachyon burst - a sort of marker at that point not all that different from the warp bursts we predicted from the Hybras event. A large disaster event should produce a proportionately large burst."

Minerva stared at her coffee for a long time as she tried to process Artemis' proposal. After a while, she took a sip, and sighed.

"Je ne sais pas, Artemis," she said as she wrapped her hands around her mug again, before turning her eyes up to look at the man across the table, "the Hybras appearances were just so much more _powerful_. They cut into our timeline rather… savagely… which was why it was so easy to see them even months or years in advance. While I admit there is some merit to the appearance of such tachyon bursts, what you want to look for… this is just too subtle of an effect."

Artemis made a sound that was almost a snort. Technically, Minerva was right. At a space-time level, the tachyon burst released by the kind of event he was thinking of would barely register as a blip in the past if it happened within its natural timeline.

Still, it felt a little wrong to talk about mass deaths as a "subtle" event.

"Of course," agreed the Irishman, "but you still haven't taken into account the _personal_ component. It should make not only detection of these events easier, but also the transport of a person _to_ the event quite possible."

He ran his fingers through his raven hair and bit his bottom lip in thought, a habit that Minerva found extremely, and very pleasantly distracting. He probably had no idea.

"There is, somehow, in all that mess of quantum soup, some kind of connection…" he continued, "an affinity, or an entanglement of some kind that makes space-time magic _personal_ ," he continued. "For the most powerful feats of magical transport to be done, there has to be some sort of connection between the person being transported, and where he or she ends up. I suspect that the more powerful the connection, the less energy is required. Otherwise, any magical being would just be zipping to and fro across time and space without issue, but it's clear that they don't do that. Or at least, as far as we know."

"But then what about Hybras? Surely the demons didn't have a _connection_ to Limbo." asked Minerva. It always came back to Hybras. Everything always came back to Hybras for her.

Artemis waved a hand dismissively.

"They had a volcano. That's access to more energy than they knew what to do with. That, and the spell was poorly constructed to begin with. Qwan once told me that more of the complexity of the spell went into dissipating the volcano's energy than what actually went into sending the island to Limbo. If it were me, I would have put the island on the moon. Much more energy-efficient, and the demons have a natural lunar affinity anyway. But with so much energy, it was probably like firing a cannon with too much gunpowder - no aim, all bang, and you accidentally rip a hole _outside_ of time while you're at it. It's a miracle they survived at all."

Minerva leaned forward, some of her loose golden curls swung down and just missed her coffee. She moved her coffee to one side. No need to embarrass herself in front of Artemis.

"But that's just it," she said, "It _does_ require huge amounts of energy, and it _is_ imprecise, as far as we can do it. The last man-made event that _might_ have been able to trigger a detectable temporal ripple was the Tsar Bomba test purely because of the energy. Even if we could send something, or someone into the future with this technique, odds are, they'll just end in the middle of some explosion. I know you think it's some kind of personal entanglement effect, but I just really don't see how we can quantify a 'connection,' as you say."

Minerva wanted to believe him, she really did.

"There are stories," said Artemis, "of twins, and siblings, and couples, where one was somehow able to sense the suffering of the other, even when separated by continents. I believe we can not only pin down the basis for this effect, but also see it ahead of time."

The woman nodded.

"Oui, c'est vrai, I have heard these stories as well," she agreed, though part of her still felt like it was a wild goose chase. She saw the intensity in Fowl's eyes and felt herself getting excited despite her doubts. It had been a long time since she had seen that from Artemis. She patted his folded hands with one of her own, and smiled what she hoped was a reassuring smile. "If anyone can figure it out, it shall be us."


	4. Good to See You Again

_**A long time from now, she might realize that it was always about her. Of course it was about her, who else could it have been? She saved me from myself when I was ready to risk interspecies war for a bit - alright, fine, not a bit, a ton - of gold. She told me to use my genius for good. Surely this counts?**_

* * *

 _Sixty-eight years after the death of Artemis Fowl._

It was at least two hours past dawn over the European continent, well past bedtime for most upstanding citizens of Haven City. The artificial sky of Haven was dark, and the harsh glow of the streetlights only lit up most of the street, but a broken light here or there left a few swaths of darkness present. The few fairies in Haven who were on foot at this hour walked mostly with their heads down, though they looked up and sped up as they approached the darkened areas and darted quickly to the next lit section.

Artemis Fowl was not only awake and in Haven City, but was headed to a place he never thought he'd ever find himself.

Artemis patted his right pocket and his left hip carefully as he prepared to enter the squat building with the faux-wood façade, and a spot-lit sign reading The Clover Patch above the door. Two small, hard boxes were there: the holoprojector on his hip, and the C Cube - his continuing side project - in his pocket. The holoprojector was currently making him look like pale off-white air sprite with thin cheeks, a button nose, and sandy brown hair that came down to his chin, held up by a headband. He did not enjoy this particular disguise.

It was only after a good bit of research, he found that it was probably the most practical if he needed to walk around unhindered in Haven City. As an air sprite, he appeared only slightly taller than average, though he still towered over most other residents of the city. The hologram made it look as if he was only wearing dark-blue pants and a faded grey vest, from which long translucent-white wings protruded out the back. In this case, it helped because people tended to give air sprites a wide berth due to their extremely sensitive wings and unfortunate tendencies to call down gusts of wind on people who bumped into them.

The sound of shouts drew his attention back to the bar. He heard the smash of breaking glass and further shouts, and hesitated. There was no way he was here for a bar fight, of all things. But then again, one never did know…

While he was still debating the wisdom of entering the establishment though, the door swung open, and an elf was ejected out into the street by an overly muscled, and quite irate pixie.

"That's enough of that!" said the pixie. "I don't care who you are, missy - you can't be causin' that kind of trouble in _my_ bar! This here is a _respectable_ establishment!"

The door slammed shut with a definitive sound.

Artemis stood, unmoving, as the ejected elf slowly picked herself up.

She had short hair - brownish in the low light - tan skin, and wore cargo pants, accompanied by a dark, form-fitting crop top under a light jacket that currently only had one arm threaded through it. When she looked up, Artemis could see smeared makeup across the elf's eyes, and a faint pink glow from her cheeks.

"D'Arvit…" she cursed to no one in particular, the bitter odor of alcohol accompanying her speech. "D'Arvitn' chauvinist idiots…"

Blue sparks flew across the knuckles on her right hand, knitting torn skin back together.

Artemis felt a shiver run down from his head to his toes.

Holly.

He'd expected to see her, of course. But probably not like this.

He carefully approached her, bending down a little in the process.

"Are you okay?" he asked, surprised at how quiet his voice came out to be.

Holly's eyes snapped up, noticing him for the first time.

"Fine," she snapped, "I'm fine."

She slipped her jacket fully on and turned quickly, stumbled, but caught herself and began to march her way down the sidewalk.

Artemis took a few steps in her direction, considering his options as he walked.

The elf spun around. "Why are you _following_ me?"

Artemis made his decision.

"I wanted to make sure you were okay… Holly."

Her face displayed shock briefly, then her eyes narrowed in suspicion.

"Who are you?" she asked sharply, "How do you know who I am?"

"I recognize you from the Fowl Manor incident," he said quickly. "I was there figuring out the time stop for it. I could never… I could never forget your face."

These were, of course, all true statements.

Holly paused, seemingly confused by something, before she turned around again and started walking in wide, wavering, drink-induced curves.

It didn't take much for Artemis to catch up with her.

"Holly, you look quite unsteady," he noted, "where are you trying to go?"

With some hesitation, he moved to steady her by holding onto her elbow. She brushed him off with a strong shove, a movement that, unfortunately, didn't do much to him, but sent her tripping and falling in the other direction.

Artemis frowned, and stopped, crouching down, but not making a move to help her.

"Holly, I am a friend. I am here to help. You should let me, for your own good."

The elf twisted around so that she was sitting on the ground, her elbows supporting herself from behind her. She stared at him, and he could see her mind trying to piece together what was going on. His voice was likely giving her some pause, if she recognized it, which, in all likelihood, she did. But it was paired with completely contradictory stimuli. Even with the Fowl Manor cue, the fact that she was looking at an air sprite in the streets of Haven would probably throw her off. He hoped the unconscious familiarity was something that would work for him, rather than against him.

"You…" she said finally, "I know you… from… somewhere."

Drunk Holly was not something Artemis had ever expected to see. It was not something he knew what to do with, and it was hard to tell whether or not her inebriated state would help or hurt him. By the sound of what happened at the bar though, he at least hoped that she didn't turn violent on him. Violent Holly he'd seen before, and being on the receiving end of that was never, ever pleasant.

"Sprawled on the ground on the side of the road is not a good look for you, Holly," he said, smiling without mirth. "Let's go over there," he suggested, pointing down the deserted road to a bus stop bench that he had noted earlier. "We can have a seat, and it's a public place, well-lit and all."

Not that he had any doubt that Holly could defend herself against him. If anything, he had doubts about the reverse.

Holly looked defiant for a moment, but then seemed to deflate. Her big eyes blinked rapidly, and it almost looked like she was holding back tears. Artemis finally reached out a hand to help her up, but she stubbornly ignored it, pushing herself up slowly, and falling back once before succeeding. She refused his help walking as well, but slowly trudged alongside him to the bench.

They sat quietly on the steel bench, which was lit by the glow of a yellow-orange glo-bulb, ringed by red like a bulbous artificial planet.

"Who are you?" asked Holly, quiet now, her face scrunching up repeatedly in what looked like an attempt to gather her concentration.

Artemis had thought about the issue of how much to reveal about himself in these situations a lot. While he and Minerva had generally concluded that there was little danger of tearing the universe apart from a bit of extra information, it was still something he wasn't sure of.

He switched off the holoprojector.

Artemis Fowl now sat on a metal bench at a bus stop in Haven City, on a deserted street, in his usual Armani suit, and black loafers. His pale, very human face was on full display, along with a pair of mismatched blue and hazel eyes.

Holly looked over at him at the slight buzzing sound of the shutdown. For a moment, she didn't move.

Then she let out a short yelp of alarm, and jerked herself backwards, ending up on the ground again, this time in front of the bench.

Artemis reached out a hand to help her up.

"Hello, Holly," he said with a little smile. "It's good to see you again."

She stared at his hand as if he had been reaching out to her with a set of tentacles.

 _'Ah,'_ Artemis thought, _'this means I probably haven't appeared to her before… or at least identified myself. Good thing to note, I suppose. It's too bad it won't help.'_

Holly accepted his hand hesitantly, and allowed him to pull her up and set her back on the bench.

He had barely sat back down himself before she moved to grab his shoulders, but stopped before she actually reached him, as if he was afraid to touch him again.

"Artemis Fowl…" she breathed. "Artemis… but how?"

"I'm dead, right?" Artemis smiled his vampire smile. It was probably appropriate for the situation. "Ah, it'll take more than that to stop me. You, of all people, should know, Holly."

It was a slight exaggeration, but _almost_ true.

 _'Well, this means I didn't live past a hundred and fifteen,'_ he thought. He could've been wrong, but by the looks of things, he was reasonably sure he was supposed to be dead.

Holly stared straight at him.

"How much did I have to drink?" she asked, partly to him, partly to herself.

The Irishman shrugged.

"I wouldn't know. Enough to get violent and thrown out of a bar, it seems."

Holly looked down, ashamed, before turning back to him.

"So there's some possibility I'm imagining all this?" she asked.

"Of course," Artemis smiled. "There's some probability that we're all imagining all of this. But that doesn't necessarily make it any less important. And no, I don't think I'll tell you how I'm here. But if this is the first time you've seen me since I died, then I'll say that odds are you'll see me again."

Then the smile left his face.

"I'm here because something is wrong, Holly," he said carefully.

 _'I'm here because you were almost certainly going to die tonight, Holly'_ he thought, sending a shiver down his spine. He hoped that before his time was up, he would have disturbed the timeline enough to throw it off that course.

"What's going on?" he asked.

It took another three seconds, but that was when the tears started to flow down Holly's face, and her chest heaved in little wave-like motions.

"I… I messed up, Arty," she said between sobs. "Last week was my first mission leading Retrieval Three… it was just a stupid extraction mission for an idiot surface tourist."

Artemis waited patiently, silently.

"We flew too close to a Chinese flight-test range," she continued. "They somehow detected us… tracked us, and started shooting."

"Two members of my team are probably never going to walk again, much less fly."

Artemis tried to process what he had heard. Why hadn't he appeared at _that_ incident then? Why did he appear _here_ , and _now_? He had a guess, and it frightened him. She was probably trying to run away from it…

He carefully laid a hand on the elf's shoulder.

"Holly," he said quietly, "I can't claim to understand…"

The elf shook her head, the motion forcing a few tears down her cheeks.

"But you _cannot_ give up," he said earnestly. "Live through it, learn from it, but _please_ don't give up on yourself."

It sounded strange, even to Artemis. Holly was much, much older than him, and had far more experience with life. But he knew that she needed to get through this point in space-time. She needed to make it through this event.

Holly suddenly grabbed onto him, holding his torso tightly with both arms, and burying her face in his shirt, leaving a shocked Fowl looking down at her. She smelled of alcohol and raspberries - but mostly of alcohol. She mumbled something against his chest.

"What was that?" he asked.

She looked up at him, her makeup even more smeared now, and her eyes red in the dim light.

"I said I don't care how you're here," she said, "but… if I'm selfish for a little bit… I'm glad you are."

Artemis relaxed slightly at that, and carefully wrapped his arms around the elf's smaller frame, completely encircling her and wrapping up her tiny, shaking body.

 _'This suit is going to be ruined,'_ he thought idly. It was an expensive suit. He was okay with that though.

He held her silently for what felt like hours, until her shaking stilled, and his nose had completely tuned out the smell of alcohol. She didn't seem to want to say anything, but every time he thought she was about the let go, she just held on even tighter.

He gave a start when the watch on his wrist buzzed, and he nearly had a moment of panic. It couldn't actually have been that long, could it?

Artemis gingerly pulled back, with a soft groan of protest from Holly. He steadied her with both hands, but held her away.

"I need to go, Holly," he said firmly. "But please… you must get through this. I know you can."

He actually did have a very good quantification for how likely she was to make it through the night without his help, and the number was extremely low. Hopefully with the nudge on the timeline, the probabilities changed significantly in her favor.

With great reluctance, he stood, but his eyes didn't leave her matching mismatched ones. She looked so small tonight, smaller than he'd ever remembered.

"Where are you going?" asked Holly desperately.

"I'm sorry," Artemis breathed, ignoring the question. "I can't stay. But I promise I will try to come back."

He touched her shoulder gently with one hand.

"Stay strong, Holly Short. With me out of the picture, God knows the world needs you."

Artemis reactivated the holoprojector, his sprite disguise buzzing into existence around him, and translucent-white wings appearing with a flash behind him. He gave her a brief holographic smile. His watch buzzed again, and his smile disappeared. He turned, forcing himself not to look back, and disappeared down the dark road.

He hoped it was enough.

* * *

 **A/N:** I'd love some feedback on this chapter. This was actually one of the most difficult chapters for me to write, and I had three other versions of it before settling on this one. On the bright side, the thought process for doing this chapter actually let me mostly finish writing two other chapters, but like I said, these aren't coming out in chronological order (though there is a reason for the order they're in).


	5. Proof

_**I thought we were perfect for each other. I tried not to let it bother me that whenever I looked into his mismatched eyes, it felt like she was there too, staring back at me. I managed to convince myself for a long time that it was just a biological oddity, and not something that had any deeper meaning. Maybe I was wrong.**_

* * *

 _Nineteen years before the death of Artemis Fowl._

Six hundred thirty-eight plus-minus fifteen years from now. That was the result of Minerva's examination of the note. The note was the only thing that Artemis had brought back with him from his jump to the future. It was written on yellow, unlined notepad paper, in small, neat letters that looked off somehow. It looked like a collection of different fonts and styles that almost matched up, but not quite, as if they were drawn rather than written, penned by someone who knew how the English alphabet worked, but wasn't used to actually writing in it.

 _Thank you for being my guardian angel._

That was all the note said. A sentence written with dye-based ink, seemingly made from some kind of lichen. A sentence made of ink and set on paper that had a entropic time signature that set its origin far in the future.

By Minerva's timing, Fowl had been gone for less than two minutes, equipped with not much more than his C Cube and a personal holoprojector. He came back, saw the note in his hand - seemingly for the first time - stared at it for a while before smiling. He handed it to Minerva and then promptly collapsed into a nearby chair, where he was currently fast asleep, snoring lightly.

After making sure that Artemis was actually just sleeping, and not something worse, Minerva had scanned the note with the tachyon detector - the large black monolith of a device that took over much of one side of the room. She and Artemis had developed the device over the last five years, creating, in essence, a self-contained temporal telescope of sorts, something that allowed them to look for 'ripples' of catastrophic events that flowed back from the future. So far, they had found three likely candidates for such events in the next eight hundred years. None of them were supposed to take place at the time she found from the note. The three sets of temporal ripples still pulsed gently from the screen on the other end of the machine. Artemis had clearly not averted one of these catastrophes. Of course, they had only found three _so far_. Odds were, they'd find one from the point of origin of the note.

"Clio," Minerva said into the air.

A half-meter-tall translucent-blue figure of a short-haired, wide-eyed young woman appeared next to Minerva on an otherwise empty chrome pedestal. She wore a utilitarian business suit and slacks, and floated a few inches off the surface of the pedestal.

The C Cube's resident AI pushed a pair of wire-frame glasses up her small nose and looked up at the French woman.

"Yes, Minerva?" she asked in a smooth voice that came from the pedestal below her hologram.

"What happened during the jump?" Minerva asked the AI. Clio had accompanied Artemis on his time jump and should have been able to provide more details about the event, though Artemis had expressed some doubts about whether or not she'd actually be carrying any useful information back with her.

Clio tilted her head and stayed silent for a moment.

"I have no record of a jump. I do seem to have had a malfunction somewhere," she said finally. "My internal clock reads twelve hours, six minutes, and thirty-two seconds faster than external atomic clocks. Should I correct this?"

"The time difference is probably how long you two spent in the future," replied Minerva, as her excitement began to grow. "That's no error. You two made the jump just now. When did you two end up?"

The hologram's brow furrowed slightly in concentration, and light rippled across her body as she thought about the question some more.

"I do not understand, Minerva," she said finally. "You are implying that Artemis carried me through a forward time jump. Though I recall plans being made for such an event, I do not have a record of such a thing occurring. Are you perhaps referring to the simulations we did last week?"

The professor huffed slightly. Clio was not being helpful. Just as Artemis predicted. Of course.

 _'Damn paradox protocol,'_ she thought.

That probably meant the note was the best they were going to get. That note and its six hundred thirty-eight plus-minus fifteen years. But she supposed it was better than accidentally triggering a paradox. That might've led to some sort of weird temporal break, causing a reset of history to some insane alternate timeline or something.

Minerva shook her head.

What a preposterous idea. Obviously. Everything was fine. Artemis was back. And besides, he went to the future - not the past. Probably, anyway.

 _'What is this about a guardian angel though?'_

* * *

"I honestly don't know who wrote that," said Artemis after he woke up, maybe an hour later. He leaned back in a large office chair, and rubbed at his temples, wiping at a spot where a bit of the residue from the electrodes remained.

"Of course you don't," scowled Minerva. "Mon Dieu, this is going to be so frustrating."

"The time signature is going to have to be enough," Artemis smiled and shrugged apologetically. "Too much risk in doing it any other way."

Minerva followed his eyes as he glanced at the note again. His mismatched eyes were fascinating to her - in an academic sense at least - especially with the story behind them. Still, she somehow couldn't shake the feeling that he looked better with his natural blues.

"The handwriting is atrocious," he observed, tapping a corner of the paper. "It makes sense, I suppose, with the global decline of penmanship in favor of typing and all. It can only get worse from here."

Minerva rolled her eyes, but gave Artemis a half-smile.

"I am glad you remembered to bring something back then, at least."

She gestured at the row of small, cylindrical probes sitting on the lab bench next to the tachyon detector, looking like sandblasted soda cans.

Artemis nodded. He walked over to the bench, picking one of the probes up. He slid a finger across the edge of one of them, causing the top to pop open, and a ring of clear tubes to rise from the interior. They all looked empty, and according to all of the tests, they were all empty. Every single one of the probes had been supposedly sent to the future, to one of the disaster periods. Each one was supposed to return with a sample of something. Anything really. Anything with an entropic time signature - which was, as far as the two humans could tell - all matter in the universe.

Each and every one had returned empty.

"I'm telling you it's the personal entanglement," said Artemis. "None of the probes went anywhere. I'm fairly sure of that now. It's likely that they reappeared a few minutes after we sent them out precisely because we only sent them out a few minutes into the future. They never got to where they were supposed to go."

Minerva drummed her fingers on the work bench.

"Six hundred thirty-eight years," she said finally. "That's quite a jump. Especially for the first time."

She paused to actually think about it, and after a moment, broke out into a huge grin, before laughing and clapping her hands together in excitement.

"You actually did it then!" she cried, finally letting the actual significance of the situation hit her.

The blonde leapt up and quickly, giving the surprised Irishman a tight hug. After a moment, she leaned back, but didn't let go.

"You brilliant man, Artemis Fowl!" she laughed, her blue eyes twinkling.

Her eyes wandered to his lips for a fraction of a second, as she fought down temptation. She kissed his right cheek instead, maybe a second longer than she would have done normally.

Artemis smiled back.

"Yes," he chuckled after she had let go. "We actually did it."

"Judging from that note, you probably also saved some damsel in distress while you were out there. Probably many such damsels, eh Arty?" she said teasingly.

Minerva went over to the lab's mini-fridge with an extra spring in her step. She pulled out a bottle of champagne she had brought from the chateau just for this occasion. Plucking two glasses from a cabinet, she held them in her other hand by their stems.

She turned back to Artemis, still with a grin on her face.

"First, we celebrate," she declared. "Then, it's my turn."

* * *

Minerva Paradizo reappeared in the lab with a bright blue flash, nearly tripping upon landing. She would have probably fallen too, if it weren't for Artemis catching her by the shoulders.

The woman settled herself for a moment, and checked both hands.

Nothing.

She checked both pockets in her coat, pulling out the holoprojector from the left, and the C Cube, along with a neatly wrapped set of electrodes and wires from the right.

She let out a long sigh, setting the items down on the work bench.

Artemis reached for the electrodes. After examining them for a moment, he frowned.

"What?" asked Minerva. "I'm sure I remembered to use them if it was relevant."

He held up the wires that they were attached to, and pulled at them a little. A large section of the wrapped wire remained stuck together.

"You didn't use it," he said, gesturing at the electrodes. "Before your last attempt, I decided to introduce another test, so I added a mild adhesive to the wires. You would have had to pull the wires apart, and it's clear that didn't happen."

Minerva slumped into a chair, her shoulders drooping.

"What was the time?"

"Four minutes, thirty-one seconds," replied Artemis.

The woman blew out a breath in frustration, sending a few golden hairs flapping away from her face.

"That's the fourth attempt," she said morosely. "And nothing. Again."

She felt Artemis set a hand on her shoulder.

"Maybe it doesn't work for everyone."

In their first six months of testing, Artemis Fowl made three jumps into the future. The shortest jump was eighty-five plus-minus six years forward. The longest was still that first jump, over six hundred years into the future.

Minerva Paradizo attempted fifty-two jumps. Each one sent her less than five minutes into the future, where no return trip was necessary.


	6. An Eye for a Guide

**A/N:** So I realized that I'm technically not entirely TLG-compliant because of a minor detail about that clone-Artemis. Oh well. I don't tend to think about the last two books very much anyway... Also, we're moving into the second half of the story, so you can think of this part as the start of a "slow reveal" of what the heck has been going on.

* * *

 _ **A long time from now, I will be there when she needs me to be.**_

* * *

 _Nineteen years before the death of Artemis Fowl_

"Let me see the simulation again."

"Very well," responded Clio, her figure flashing purple as she interfaced with the tachyon detection mainframe.

Artemis could have sworn she sounded a little annoyed. But there was no way that was true. He was just projecting his own emotions onto the AI's tone.

A world map appeared on the wall in front of him, and underneath it, a timeline showing the next two thousand years.

"I'm starting the particle swarm optimization," said Clio from his right.

Artemis nodded silently, as a snowstorm of pale white dots appeared over both the map and the timeline. The dots swirled and flowed for a few seconds, as if blown by an invisible storm. Most of them gradually disappeared, and the remainder converged on a single time and place.

The map showed a cluster of white dots now, just south of Vancouver, and the timeline had a sharp bell curve centered at seventy-two years in the future.

Artemis cradled his chin with one hand, and tapped on the table with the other. It didn't make sense. None of his jumps had been to that time. Either there was something wrong with the simulation, or there was something wrong with their way of pinpointing the temporal origin of the things he had brought back.

There was, of course, a piece of information he knew he was missing. While the simulations told him both the time and the place he was likely to go to, the items he brought back only had a temporal signature. He couldn't figure out where they came from with any degree of certainty.

Still, there might be something…

"Superimpose known Lower Elements settlements and chute exits."

Dozens of red and green dots appeared on the screen. The largest two dots appeared just south of Ireland, and in the middle of the Mediterranean sea.

"Shall I include the smaller fairy forts?" asked Clio.

"Sure, why not?" said Artemis, not seeing any pattern with the current map.

More red dots appeared on the map, with many being clustered together, and exclusively showing up on land.

Artemis thought about the pattern for a good fifteen minutes.

But still, nothing came to him. There was simply nothing he could match with the simulation.

He glanced over at a side monitor, which showed the biotemporal signature of his DNA. The mainframe was using that as the basis on which to calculate when and where in the future he would be attracted to on different jumps. So far, none of the time signatures of the things he had brought back matched any of the simulations.

 _'There has to be something to do with the personal entanglement issue… we still haven't figured out how it works,'_ he mused. _'But there must be some effect.'_

Suddenly, he had a thought. He stepped over to the C Cube's omnisensor, which was currently pointed to a small vial of his blood. He picked up the sensor and pointed it roughly at his right eye - his hazel eye. Or more precisely, Holly's hazel eye.

"Clio, scan my biotemporal signature again."

"Sir?" asked the AI, confused.

"Just do it."

The omnisensor flashed once, before Artemis could blink.

Artemis set the device back down, as colors rippled over Clio's hologram, signifying that she was processing the scan. A moment after the rippling stopped, she spoke.

"The DNA composition and the signature are quite different from the scan of your blood," she said. "But you knew that already, didn't you? That was Captain Short's eye."

"Yes," Artemis smiled. "Now weigh the signature from my DNA taking into account the proportion that's comprised of Holly's DNA."

"One eye, sir?"

"Yes, one eye."

One eye's worth of personal entanglement.

He sat and waited.

The simulation took a few minutes to run, but once it did, the dots settled very differently.

The time settled on a spot eighty-seven years in the future. The location settled on a spot just south of Ireland.

"There we go…" Artemis smiled a smile of triumph. "Now zoom in and show me the map in three dimensions... and overlay a map of Haven City on it."

He was almost sure now.

The map shifted, tilting to show a third dimension, and indeed, the cluster of particles was well underground - a fact that was hidden by the previous projection. The simulation showed the highest landing probability in Haven itself. Specifically on Haven's east side. It was one of the lower levels, one that Artemis' maps showed was a mixed-use area, with various shops and pubs and the occasional tattoo parlor.

More importantly though, eighty-seven years matched the signature of one of the objects he brought back - a small piece of glass that looked like it might have once belonged to a bottle.

So he had appeared in Haven, it seems. And the jumps that he made were likely guided by an entanglement with a certain elf.

Artemis sat back and considered these facts.

None of the times that he had gone to so far matched up with the tachyon bursts he and Minerva had detected. That meant that he never actually made it to any of the disasters that he had meant to go to, which might explain why they were still detecting those bursts.

He had been jumping to something that he was already entangled with. That would explain why both Minerva and the probes couldn't get anywhere.

But that would mean that he was jumping forward to times and places associated with Holly Short. And the way the jumps were set up, it would mean that he was going to places where _she_ was releasing a tachyon burst - one too small to be detectable from the current time, but a burst nonetheless. A quantum signature associated with the death of a living creature.

He had made more than one jump though, and to very different times.

Artemis had started this project with the idea of preventing massive disasters, and saving many lives. Could it be that - for now at least - that was impossible?

Could it be that he had instead been spending his time saving the life of Holly Short?

That wasn't _quite_ what he had in mind.

But he was more than okay with that.

"Clio, prep for another jump."

* * *

 **A/N:** You all saw that one coming, right? Don't worry, even if you did, there are plenty of fun twists coming along later. ;-)


	7. The Paradox Protocol

_**I should have suffered every single time, but he always saved me from the worst of it. The price he paid was in forgetting. The price I paid was in remembering that he forgot.**_

* * *

 _Two hundred two years after the death of Artemis Fowl_

"Playtime's over kids," said Foaly, the projected image showing his tail swishing back and forth in impatience. "Best get back belowground before the sun rises."

Holly glared at the centaur through her visor's visual link, ignoring the changing color of the sky on the horizon in front of them. The ocean waves lapped at the well-worn rocks under her, and the last of the LEP shuttles was quietly faded into invisibility in the distance over a strangely calm sea.

Artemis, who was perched on a rock next to her, was checking a watch. It was almost a cute motion, checking a watch. Retro, actually. The only people who wore watches that were really _just_ watches these days were those artsy-type humans who printed their own mock-ancient devices and pretended it was still the 1800s. Or the early 2000s. It was all the same mish-mosh of history to them. Then again, his suit was also at least a century and a half out of date.

Holly jumped off lightly, her suit automatically amplifying her motion until she landed gracefully on Artemis' rock. She put her fists on her hips.

"So what happens now, Artemis?"

The man looked up.

"Hmm? What happens? Just what Foaly said. You'd better get belowground before the sun rises."

"Don't play with me, Mud Boy."

The decidedly middle-aged Artemis Fowl quirked an eyebrow at her. Holly rolled her eyes. It was a habit she never quite broke. He'd always be a Mud Boy to her.

"The crisis is over," Holly continued, crossing her arms now, "we caught the rouge sprites, and Atlantis is safe. You don't have an excuse for keeping your mouth shut anymore. How are you here, and where are you going?"

Artemis gave her a searching look, and remained silent for a few moments.

"Holly, have I really never shown myself before? Is this really the first time you've seen me since I died?"

The elf opened her mouth to say something, but then thought about it, stopped, and nodded.

"Foaly?" asked Artemis.

The centaur's face appeared in the air between them as Holly's visor automatically responded to Artemis' query.

"Hey, don't look at me," said Foaly, waving his hands in front of him in a placating gesture. "I didn't say anything to her, just like you asked… the last four times."

" _What_?" asked Holly icily.

Artemis sighed, and seemed to think about it, staring off for a moment towards where the last shuttle had disappeared.

"A little privacy then, Foaly?" he asked, resigned. "And your suit's recording devices too, Holly. I'd prefer to keep this among friends."

Foaly gave a small smile and a half-hearted salute.

"Good to see you again Fowl. I'm sure you'll be popping up again before we know it."

His image disappeared.

Holly muttered a quick command to override her suit's recording systems. Police accountability and evidence-gathering probably didn't extend to these situations. And even if it did, she didn't particularly care.

"Well?" she asked, still staring at the human, "what's this about _the last four times_?"

Artemis smiled in a way that seemed too old for him.

"Have a seat, Holly," he said, patting the spot next to him. "It must have been a while since we've actually spoken."

Holly grudgingly sat, leaving her knees up, and holding on to them as she faced Fowl.

"I am, as you must know by now, a time traveler," said the man.

The fairy stayed silent, waiting for him to continue.

"What you probably don't know, is _what kind_ of time traveler."

"I didn't realize there were different kinds," said Holly, frowning.

Artemis chuckled.

"Of course there are. You should ask Qwan about it some time. I'm sure he'd be happy to enlighten you. Or you might look up some of the work that I'm sure I have published a long time ago now, if you're feeling technical."

He spread his arms, palms up. A gesture of openness, as Holly recalled. A rare one for Artemis Fowl.

"I'm a forward time traveler," he said. "And not only that, but a _very specific_ kind of forward time traveler. I don't control where and when I travel to. You do."

Holly's brow furrowed.

"And how's that?"

Artemis shrugged.

"The details are a tad complicated. Suffice to say that in my lifetime, I have found a way to know when you are in extreme danger in the future - my future - and go there, wherever and _whenever_ you might be."

It sounded like he was holding something back. And it wasn't just because it was complicated.

"From what Foaly says, I _have_ appeared in the future - after my natural death, that is - before. Perhaps I never took off my disguise."

He reached into a pocket and wiggled something around inside. Instantly, his image was replaced with that of an air sprite, with brown hair and light grey eyes. A large double-pair of vein-crossed white wings burst into existence on his back.

"Look familiar?" he asked, smirking.

Holly frowned. A moment later, she swallowed nervously.

"I could have sworn it was a dream," she said quietly. "There was a time… a long time ago… when I was in a coma… There were times when I was almost aware, and I thought I saw a sprite that looked just like that."

She saw Artemis flick the hologram back off, returning to his usual appearance, but she was still deep in thought, trying to remember an even hazier incident.

"There might have been another time…" the elf said slowly. "I even thought that you didn't use that disguise that time… Not sure about that one though." She laughed without humor. "I, ah… I was pretty drunk that time."

"I've probably paid you a visit those times, then." Artemis gave her a small smile. "But now that you know, you really probably should get back before the sun comes up fully. I'm running out of time before I get pulled back. That's also not something I can control particularly well."

"I'll be fine," Holly gestured to her suit. "The whole nighttime thing is more of a preference than a necessity these days. Besides can't an old friend see you off?"

Artemis' smile disappeared. After a moment, he sighed, and reached into a jacket pocket.

"So from what I can gather from what you and Foaly have said, I can deduce that he knows about the paradox protocol, and that you do not."

He looked around for a moment, back towards land, and got up, beginning to walk in that direction, carefully stepping from rock to rock, avoiding the tide pools as he went.

"Come with me," he said, "As much as I am happy to ruin another suit for the sake of science, I'd generally like to avoid that when possible."

As they passed the high tide line, onto a more pebbly section of the seaside, Artemis sat down, picked up a small stone, and dropped it into his pocket. From the same pocket, he withdrew a thin black case, and opened it to reveal a set of thin white circular bits of soft-looking foam.

"Paradox protocol?" prompted Holly, following him, and staring at the case.

Artemis chuckled.

"A bit melodramatic a name, I suppose, but quite important."

He took a foam piece and removed some plastic backing before sticking it carefully on his face. He repeated the process with all of the pieces, until his face, temples, and even the back of his neck were covered in foam.

The scene looked a little familiar to Holly.

"Are you… are you performing a mind wipe on yourself?" she asked, her voice trembling slightly.

"Very good, Major," said Fowl. "A block wipe. Quite doable, even for my primitive twenty-first century human technology."

He pocketed the bits of plastic backing, and gave Holly a long look.

"The paradox protocol is quite simple," he said. "I have traveled to the future, and have seen things I should not have seen. If I bring too many of these things or even these ideas back with me, I may trigger a paradox. Say, for example, your suit, which I have never seen before this week. If I see it now, and made it in the early twenty-first century, then who actually invented it? Where did it come from? Paradox."

Holly opened her mouth to reply, but nothing came out.

"Thus, a mind wipe, every time," he said matter-of-factly. "I unfortunately do not have the luxury of being able to keep my memories of my time in the future. The next time you see me, I shall be… slightly less well-informed, shall we say?"

Major Short suddenly had a very bad feeling creep across her body.

"Wait," she said quickly, "you've been on this jump for nearly a week, and it sounds like you've made at least four or five more before."

Artemis began to look away, but she grabbed his shoulders, forcing him to face her, electrodes and all. As she looked at him, she felt like she was really examining his face for the first time since he jumped to this time.

Artemis Fowl looked older than she had thought before. There were deep crinkles running off from the edges of his eyes, and permanent lines coming from his nose down to his chin. The skin under his chin was loose, and there was a certain puffiness about his features that showed that he certainly was no young man any longer. He looked well into middle-age.

"How many jumps have you made? How many jumps do we not know about?"

Fowl's lips squeezed together into a silent, determined line.

"How much time did you wipe away?"

The crashing waves sounded behind them, and a seagull called out into the morning air as neither man nor elf spoke. After a moment, Fowl's watch interrupted them with a buzzing noise.

Artemis glanced down at it.

"That's my three-minute warning, Holly. I need to get going."

Holly shook his shoulders.

"Answer the question, Artemis!"

The man stayed silent for a moment.

"You asked three."

Holly glared at him.

"I don't know," he said finally. "I lost track of the jumps where I didn't bring something back. There were a lot of those. Obviously I can't remember how much time I've wiped. Also, the jumps don't happen in order, Holly. I've already been to your future. Not that I remember anything about it."

He looked away, almost as if guilty. It was an extraordinarily rare look for Artemis Fowl.

"How old are you?" asked Holly in a terrified whisper.

"In my time… I celebrated my thirty-second birthday two days before I made this jump," he said wistfully. "Chocolate-raspberry cake and all. The Butlers were there. So was Minerva. You remember her, don't you?"

Holly couldn't speak. She was no expert in Mud Man faces, but she had seen enough of them in her years to know that Artemis Fowl looked well beyond his early thirties.

His watch buzzed again.

"Two minutes, Major," said Artemis, pulling out a light blue cube from another pocket, as well as a small white tablet. "While I'd love to stay and chat, I don't quite think that's worth bringing down a paradox on our universe. According to my models, the effects can be quite devastating to the fabric of space-time."

"Clio, prepare to initiate the paradox protocol."

A blue female human figure appeared on top of the cube. She nodded once.

"As you wish, sir," she said before flashing white. The electrodes on Artemis' face and neck pulsed white once, and he put the cube back in its pocket.

The man turned back to Holly.

"Now it's best if I'm asleep for this part," he said, showing her the tablet. "Stay safe, Holly. I'll be back one day."

And before she could do anything, Artemis popped the tablet into his mouth and rolled it around, allowing it to dissolve.

"Artemis!" cried Holly, as his eyes started to droop. She caught his shoulders as he slumped backwards. She fell into a sitting position as his weight pushed her down. He was heavier than she expected, but she held on to him tightly

The electrodes were all flashing now, in a mad light show that danced around randomly on the Irishman's head. His eyes rolled around and around behind his eyelids, frantically looking for something that was being taken away from him.

Holly held on to his head all the while, cradling it in her arms as she felt moisture begin to gather in her eyes.

"Artemis Fowl… what were you thinking?"

The memory wipe ended within a few seconds, and for a while, Holly could do nothing but hold on to the unconscious human. Her helmet detected moisture on her face and assumed that she was sweating, so the collar of her suit responded by growing a few degrees cooler.

A little over a minute later, a shower of red sparks began arcing over Artemis' body, completely covering him in seconds. At one point, it became too bright for Holly to continue looking at it, and she squeezed her eyes shut involuntarily.

An instant later, the pressure on her legs was gone. She opened her eyes, and Artemis Fowl was no longer there.

And Holly Short was alone by the sea as the sun slowly rose over the horizon.

* * *

 **A/N:** And now you know exactly why he's the forgetful angel. What do you think? Last 1/3 of the story coming up, from the perspectives of Artemis, Holly, and finally, Minerva.


	8. Note to Self

_**A long time from now she may recall the young boy she once knew. I wonder if she will think back to the extent of my natural life and see the signs of what she meant to me.**_

* * *

 _Two years before the death of Artemis Fowl_

Artemis Fowl groaned as the sunlight from the window hit his face. It took a few seconds for him to register the fact that his head was on his arms, and his arms were on his desk. He had fallen asleep at his desk. That much, he vaguely remembered.

His jacket was off, but his tie was still on. He groaned again, feeling stiff and sore from spending the night in such a position.

At some point, he realized that he was holding a piece of paper in his right hand. Curious, he opened the hand and lay the small scrap flat.

It was a note.

 _Go back to her._

Fowl blinked at the note a few times as his tired brain tried to catch up with what was going on. This was only the second time he had ever brought a note back. Everything after his first jump had just been random little trinkets. There was never a note again until now. It was his own handwriting this time.

Artemis rotated his neck slowly, feeling it pop a few times as his eyes settled on the wall-mounted display next to the desk. It was early Sunday morning. He remembered a conference call to the States was supposed to happen at some point on Monday.

 _'Oh well. Good a time as any to be making another jump.'_

"Clio," he called out automatically.

* * *

 _One hundred fifty-seven years after the death of Artemis Fowl_

He landed on his feet, at the end of what seemed like a hospital bed. He wasn't even sure when he had landed, but somehow, hospitals just always felt like hospitals, no matter human or fairy, and no matter the time. It was a minuscule room though, with barely enough space to walk around the bed and fit a pair of doors on either side of one end. The design of the room was all soft, flowing corners, and diffuse lighting, quite unlike any place he had been in before in the Lower Elements. At least he thought it was the Lower Elements.

On the bed, a small elfin head poked out from under a bundle of covers.

He moved to one side of the bed to study the face of Holly Short. Her hair was quite a bit longer than he was used to, splayed out onto her pillow like a burnt-copper halo. That, in combination with her naturally cherubic face, made her look like a tired little angel in training. Her breathing was slow, quiet, and rhythmic, and for just a moment, Artemis forgot himself and smiled at the scene.

"Welcome back, sir."

Fowl gave a start, as Clio's face appeared on the wall next to the bed.

 _'Ah,'_ he realized, _'if I told myself to come back, I must have left an instance of Clio here.'_

Artemis gestured at the sleeping elf.

"Keep it down," he said quietly.

Clio looked at him for a moment, then smiled a small, wry smile that Artemis could have sworn was not in her programming. Then again, the AI learned quite a bit from being on the internet that surprised him.

"I'm sorry, sir," she continued in a volume that was barely quieter than what she was using before. "But if I woke Major Short up, that would be quite an improvement."

A pneumatic hiss signaled the opening of one of the doors to the room, and Artemis dropped a hand to the holoprojector, about the turn it on before he recognized a familiar tin-foil hat. He briefly wondered if Foaly still thought that actually offered any actual protection in… whatever year this was.

"Fowl," said the centaur as he entered the room, "Good, you're back."

"Yes, I'm back," said Artemis. "Would you mind telling me why I'm back in a time that I've apparently just left?"

"Magic-resistant viral infection," he said solemnly. "Got to Holly over here. And to nearly a third of the elves under the planet. It's bad. She's in an artificially-induced coma. You've already been here working on a cure for nearly four months before you hit some sort of time limit on your jump. You said you'd be back."

He looked meaningfully at Artemis.

"I'm glad you're here, Mud Boy. If there was ever a time you'd come in handy, this is definitely it."

Then he winced.

"Don't get a bloated head, Fowl, I'm only telling you that because you'll forget anyway."

Artemis allowed himself a small smile.

"Of course."

Foaly waved him over, opening the door again.

"Come on, Mud Boy. We needed this done months ago. Your little pet abacus," Artemis saw the C Cube AI fold her arms crossly, "can start reminding you of what you've already done so you can get back on track."

* * *

The sunlight that woke Artemis this time came from a slightly higher angle, just below the highest branch in the tree outside the window. It wasn't quite so early in the morning as the last time he woke up. He shifted around for a bit, noting that a suit was not a comfortable thing to fall asleep in, despite the number of times he had done it before.

There was still a note in his hand.

 _Go back to her._

Curious.

* * *

He landed on his feet, at the end of what seemed like a hospital bed in a tiny room with soft features.

On the bed, a small elfin head poked out from under a bundle of covers.

"Welcome back, sir."

* * *

The sunlight that woke Artemis Fowl up came from a little bit above the highest branch in the tree outside the window.

There was a note in his hand.

* * *

He landed on his feet, at the end of what seemed like a hospital bed in a tiny room with soft features.

On the bed, a small elfin head poked out from under a bundle of covers.

"Welcome back, sir."

* * *

And so it went.

* * *

The sun didn't wake Artemis Fowl up. It was already evening. The ringing of a telephone woke him this time.

Somehow, he was too tired to even answer the call. His brain felt muddled and hazy, as if trying to get up from a particularly thick vat of syrup.

The call went to voicemail.

"Hey Artemis," came the voice of Ramona Butler, his parents' current bodyguard, though these days, she was more of an assistant than a bodyguard. "Just a heads up, I'll be back at the manor with Mr. and Mrs. Fowl in about fifteen minutes. You _did_ promise to have dinner with them tonight, in case you got wrapped up in your work and forgot. Grilled salmon's on the menu, if I remember right."

The phone clicked.

Artemis picked himself up, and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. It was only then that he noticed he didn't have a note in his hand. Instead, there was one on the desk - something he must have dropped in his sleep.

 _A job well done, if I do say so myself._

Artemis Fowl smiled, and slipped the note into his drawer. It floated in like a snowflake into a snowbank composed of numerous other notes, all of which had been added to the drawer that day. This one, the one now resting face-up on the top of the pile, was the only one that said something different than any of the others.

* * *

 _One week before the death of Artemis Fowl_

Artemis Fowl attempted a forward time jump, and landed three minutes and forty-two seconds into the future. It did not require a return trip.

He tried this three more times, and each time, he ended up no more than five minutes into the future.

There were no more points for him to jump to. He had made it to every single point of entanglement.

Artemis sat back in his chair, and stared up at the ceiling.

After a moment, he smiled, and then he laughed. It was a full-bodied, clear laugh that seemed to pull a tension he didn't know he was carrying up through his body, through his voice, and completely out of him.

He looked over to the wall, where a scheduled reminder blinked at him.

He had been invited to give a lecture at the MIT Kavli Institute in Cambridge in a week, the day after St. Patrick's Day. He was presenting his work on tachyon burst theory and the possibility of its use in disaster preparation, maybe in a decade or two, when the work was more mature.

It was all just theory for now. And somehow, that gave him no small measure of relief.


	9. The Name of Their Office

_**A/N:** _ Two notes. First, thank you. It's been a long time since I've written any creative piece, so I'm glad to see that I can still put a story together and I'm glad you were here to read along. Second, I realized about halfway through that this fic might have actually worked better as a lengthy one-shot, or at least it works better as something read in one sitting. Therefore, **if you have been following my updates on this story, I highly recommend stopping right now, and reading it over from the beginning.** Little details will make a lot more sense, and I think it'll be more enjoyable overall. Also, I put in the quote in the prologue that inspired this story to begin with, which will explain the name of this chapter. Anyway, enjoy the last two chapters (updated at the same time!) of The Forgetful Angel.

* * *

 _ **I should have seen him for what he was earlier. In some of my daydreams, I fancied him one of the Maiar, sent to watch over me. But no, I realized that wasn't quite right. Artemis is quite human, even if he seems to defy that definition sometimes. He is probably closer to what the human legends call an Angel - a guide, a guardian, for me. 'Maiar' describes a kind of creature. Angel, though, is a job description.**_

* * *

 _Six hundred eighteen years after the death of Artemis Fowl_

A flash of ruby-red light erupted in the air next to her, throwing out long, arcing sparks into the dark room that gave the air a distinct smell of ozone.

In bed, Holly Short cracked an eye open, and her hand darted reflexively to grab the small ZeroPoint blaster tucked under her nightstand. The blaster's bio-link pulled up the targeting system in her contact lenses, drawing a firing angle to the sparks directly over her vision.

But as her normal mental faculties took over from her instincts, Holly's blaster arm relaxed, and the targeting system faded away.

The light evolved momentarily into a sphere, taking over much of the space to the left of the bed. But just as quickly as it had appeared, it evaporated, leaving a dazed man in a dark suit standing in its place, blinking furiously, presumably to adjust to the dark after being assaulted by the sparks of the jump.

Holly smiled, and quickly tucked the ZeroPoint away.

She sat up, and waved a hand to slowly bring the room's lights up to twilight levels.

Finally, she spoke to the man who had appeared.

"Hello Artemis, I've been expecting you."

Holly smiled. It had been far too long.

The disoriented Irishman finally focused on the elf, and, after two long seconds, recognized her.

"Holly?" he said, astonished.

The elf in question smirked. It wasn't every day that she got to catch Artemis Fowl unawares.

"Yes, yes, I'm still Holly Short. Good to see you and all," she said, pointing to a door. "Now if you don't mind, sitting room's over there. Go make yourself some tea or something. You know what they say about Mud Men who catch old fairies in their sleepwear."

Not that they actually said anything about any such thing, but Artemis didn't know that.

She could almost hear the gears turning in Artemis' mind. Much faster than most, of course, but still rather amusing given the situation.

"Er, right."

He turned and walked gingerly to the door, ducking slightly under the elf-sized frame as illumination slowly filled the sitting room.

Holly motioned the door shut, and slipped out of bed to find more appropriate attire.

She found Artemis Fowl in the sitting room a minute later, having eschewed the too-small chair in favor of sitting on a large, cream-colored pillow on the floor. It was one of a few pillows she kept around a low faux-mahogany table in her small apartment. The sitting room was decorated in earth tones and covered in a spongey carpet that was reminiscent of moss. A tiny hydroponic garden sat off to one side, flanked on either side by a pair of potted bonsai trees.

Artemis was studying the few plaques that hung on one wall, but turned quickly to her when she entered.

She saw his eyes widen slightly at her appearance. She wondered if it was the dress.

"Hello, Artemis," she said, smiling. "It's been a long time, hasn't it?"

"Holly," he breathed, staring at her, with his mouth slightly open in a very un-Artemis-like expression.

"Congratulations on your first jump," she said, leaning against the door frame. "Welcome to… ah, the future, I suppose. And yes, dresses are back in fashion, even for old elves like me."

Artemis looked very much like the way he always looked as a young man - short, dark hair, slightly off-white complexion, and jet-black Armani suit. Holly wondered how long it had been since any piece of clothing that was _not_ a suit had been on the man's body.

Holly herself, however, probably looked a little different from the way the human remembered her.

The time spent in a coma, fighting off the Pandora virus had aged her prematurely, sapping up her magic, along with that of many of the Earth's elves. If it had not been for a cure invented by a mysterious white-winged sprite, elves might have become extinct.

This elf's auburn hair ran long now, in slightly wavy tresses down to the middle of her back, though strands of grey could be seen if one looked closely enough. The soft facial features she had when she was younger now had a different kind of softness to them, the softness inherent in old age, a kind that hinted at a hardness underneath borne of a long lifetime of experience. She was barefoot, and wore a simple leaf-green dress made of light material - one she often wore around the house these days.

She crossed her arms and studied the human for a moment before breaking out into a grin.

"Haven't figured out how to make tea yet, Arty?"

"Well… well I _am_ in the far future aren't I?" said Artemis, almost - but not quite - flustered. "At least give me a few minutes."

Holly laughed and crossed over to a small alcove in the wall and spoke to it.

"Tea. Earl Grey. Hot."

A mug appeared in the alcove, which she took carefully in one hand.

"Smoothie. Mango-pineapple. Iced."

A glass appeared, which she also took.

Holly walked over to the low table in the middle of the room and set the Earl Grey in front of Artemis, before putting her own drink down and pulling up a pillow to sit at a ninety-degree angle from Artemis.

She saw confusion flit across the man's face.

"How did you know what I wanted?" he asked.

Holly laughed.

"Ha! I love this! Knowing more than Artemis Fowl. Is this how you normally feel with people?"

Artemis blinked at her, and wisely decided not to respond. He took a sip of tea instead.

"You told me yourself, Arty. A number of times, in fact."

The man peered at her through the steam from his cup.

"This wasn't what I expected," he said finally. "I expected -"

"A disaster," finished Holly. She raised an eyebrow. "You were going to wear a designer suit to a disaster area?"

He seemed to think about it for a moment, and Holly thought she saw him blush.

"Well, I'm clearly not at a disaster area, am I?" asked Artemis.

"No, we're safe here. New Aleppo is as safe as any other acropolis these days."

Artemis scratched his head.

"So I failed, but somehow managed to find you in the future somewhere…" He suddenly paused. "Wait - are we aboveground?"

Holly pointed at a wall, and its previously light-brown color disappeared, leaving a clear floor-to-ceiling pane of glass. Beyond the glass, the last rays of a setting sun poured in, bouncing in pink and red between what must have been hundreds or thousands of gleaming spires. Flying things jetted from spire to spire, too fast and far away to tell whether they were natural or mechanical. The ground couldn't usually be seen from this height, as it was usually obscured by clouds and walkways.

"We're quite far aboveground, in fact," said Holly.

Artemis stared out the window, as the realization of where and when he was began to hit him.

"How far did I jump?" he asked, breathless.

Holly pulled a piece of paper from a pocket in her dress. It was a copy of a copy, but even still, it was an ancient piece of paper, long and folded over many times. A rather extensive list of numbers was written on it in tiny, neat handwriting, in a single column that fell down to the floor and then some. All but one of the numbers had a check mark next to them. She looked at the number on the very top, which was left unchecked.

"Six hundred thirty-eight plus-minus fifteen years, it says here," she read. She stood and picked up her glass, walking over to stand next to Artemis, staring out at the encroaching night. "You didn't fail, Artemis."

She passed the paper up to the Mud Man.

"You succeeded spectacularly."

Artemis stared at the list.

"I made this many jumps?" he asked quietly, a slow smile spreading across his face.

"Yup," replied Holly, reaching up and setting a hand on Artemis' arm. "Every single one of those. That's how many times you saved my life."

The smile dropped from Fowl's face as he turned to look at Holly.

"What do you mean?"

"Artemis… your disaster prevention system never worked the way you wanted it to," explained Holly. "You thought you could send people into the future to prevent massive casualties from one thing or another. You couldn't. Nobody could do it. Even our warlocks couldn't figure it out."

Artemis gave her an incredulous look.

"The future's not our specialty," shrugged Holly. "Stop time? No problem. Go back in time? Be careful, sign a thousand forms and swear some magically-binding oaths and you've got it. But the future?" She shook her head. "Only one person has ever managed a future time jump, Artemis."

She glanced at the list.

"Or rather, many such jumps. You always said it was some kind of entanglement thing or other, but we could never reproduce it. Even with fairy help, Paradizo couldn't do it, and neither could anyone else."

Artemis looked at the list thoughtfully.

"So I was right," he said, a hint of triumph in his voice. "And I suppose this means that I had some sort of quantum entanglement with you, hm?"

Holly shrugged.

"Something like that. I'm sure you'll figure it out eventually."

A few long moments passed as the sun continued to set, and shapes continued to fly across the cityscape.

"You said this is how many times I saved your life?" asked Fowl, looking down the length of the paper.

Holly nodded, staring out.

"Your detector was still looking for time coordinates with a high death probability. You found them. You found _all_ of them. But only for me. I probably wouldn't have lived to see the twenty-second century if it weren't for you."

Artemis suddenly dropped into a crouch, letting the piece of paper fall to the floor and bringing himself to eye level with the elf.

"High death probability?" he asked urgently, staring at her. "I thought you said we were safe here?"

Holly turned to look at him, giving him a small smile.

"We _are_ safe, Arty." She put a finger on his lips. "Elves know when it's our time. It's part of our magic. So even you can't do anything this time around."

Artemis opened his mouth to speak, but Holly pressed on his lips a little more.

"It's okay," she said, still smiling. "You've already done far more than you, me, or anyone else could have hoped for. Sit. Stay. Chat with an old friend who misses you."

Holly stared at the worried young man, who still thought that maybe there was something more. She felt her eyes water up.

"You know, Artemis," she said softly. "I think it makes sense that you're here with me now."

"Why is that?" asked the man, pulling her finger away from his mouth, but not letting go of her hand once he did.

"I've been reading your human legends lately," said Holly. "A lot of them are surprisingly similar to the ones we elves have. You know the ones you have about angels sent by God?"

Artemis nodded.

"Of course."

"Well, I learned that angel is an occupation, much like a leprechaun. Except sometimes, you don't know that you're doing the job," she said, a teasing smile on her face. "Thank you for being my guardian angel."

Holly leaned forward, and slipped a piece of paper into his pocket, a note that she had written a while ago.

"For later," she whispered.

"And for now." She kissed Artemis on the forehead.

An old fairy coin that hung at her neck swung out a little and touched the man's face.

Artemis stared, still seemingly slightly dazed.

"That's the coin you gave me," he said in recognition. "A long time ago."

"Mhm," replied Holly. "And you gave it back to me. Along with that list. Though it took me forever to figure out what the list meant. Next time you should leave some instructions on how to read your notes."

"I have a question, Arty," she asked after a moment. "I have a feeling that you know, even now, at your first jump. Why didn't you remind me to visit you more in your lifetime? I know I could have used a few reminders…"

Artemis Fowl moved from a crouch into a sitting position as he thought about the question and what it implied in his future. He sighed, and got a faraway look in his eyes.

"I would guess that's because I knew that our lives moved at very different paces… and that it just wouldn't really have worked." He glanced at the list on the floor next to him. "Though it seems like we did get to spend some time together after all."

"Yeah," smiled the elf, sitting down next to him. "We did."

Artemis looked sideways at his diminutive friend, with a slight frown on his face.

"Holly…" he said quietly. The elf looked up. "If you know that…" Artemis swallowed. "If you know it's your time… aren't you afraid?"

Holly was silent for a while.

"Maybe a little," she admitted. "But I was afraid nearly every time I was in danger. And every time, you showed up. And you're here now. Like I said, my guardian angel."

She took his hand and held it in hers. An old, slightly rough elfin hand, against a young, soft human hand.

"I'm no angel," muttered Fowl.

Holly simply smiled at him.

Artemis stayed there with her for twelve hours, six minutes, and thirty-two seconds, disappearing back to his own time shortly after sunrise.

Holly never saw Artemis Fowl again. But he saw her many times over the course of his adult life. This was, after all just the first jump, and he had a long list left to fill.

And after he finished writing the list, in his own time, after each trip into the future, he carefully placed it into a small envelope, and after a thought, slipped his fairy coin in there as well, with instructions for it to be left to the elf, Holly Short.


	10. Will I See You Again?

_**I thought a Nobel Prize would make me happy. It was something I have dreamed of ever since I was a small child. But frankly, I would give it all up just to see him again. Maybe I am growing sentimental in my old age.**_

* * *

 _Thirty-eight years after the death of Artemis Fowl_

"It's okay, I'll go on from here on my own."

Minerva stepped carefully onto the sidewalk, pushing her walker ahead of her.

"Please be careful Dr. Paradizo," said her driver from behind her.

The woman grunted her assent, but didn't look back.

At eighty-two years old, Minerva Paradizo certainly was not the spry young woman she used to be. She stood slightly hunched over her walker, and kept warm with a thick brown cardigan and an ankle-length dress. Her once-golden curls now hung flat, sparse, and mostly white over a face crisscrossed with deep wrinkles. Her eyes, though, remained sharp.

Pushing her walker across the grass was difficult, but Minerva was nothing if not persistent. A gold medal that she grasped in her right hand clinked with each step as it hit the metal of the walker. She carefully walked her way between the rows of tombstones to reach one at the far end - a low, grey one, which wasn't all that much different from any of the ones around it.

She paused, shifted her walker around, and rested heavily against the metal frame.

"Hello, Artemis," she said with a small smile.

She didn't say anything for a long while, just staring intently at the name etched on the stone.

"I came by to let you know… we did it."

She lifted the gold Nobel medal in her thin hand so that the front faced the stone. A few seconds passed in silence, and Minerva sighed, and set her hand back on the walker.

She wasn't in Ireland very often, but she did visit almost every time that she was. She had visited many years ago, when the Paradizo technique had been used to prepare for the aftermath of a large earthquake off to the east of the Philippines. There wasn't any way for them to know what the cause of the massive casualties was beforehand, nor was there a way to prevent it, but with the knowledge of high mass-death probability, the international community had been able to prepare aid packets and teams beforehand, station them in China, and quickly send them in afterwards.

Minerva had always pushed for Artemis' name to be attached to the technique as well, but it appeared that the scientific community had made up its mind. After all, there was already a Paradizo-Fowl technique, and it wasn't as if Artemis was lacking in things named after him. Thus, the Paradizo technique, which was the reason she had won this year's Nobel Prize in physics.

She pulled a thin envelope from inside her coat, and set it against the grave marker. It was a copy of her Nobel Prize diploma.

"We both know you deserved that as much as I did."

Though Artemis never really sought these kinds of recognition, the prize had been Minerva's dream since she was a child. Winning, though wonderful, did not quite produce the exuberance she imagined as a child. It had been Artemis' dream in his last few years to figure out how to use the tachyon bursts to save lives. He never did see it come to fruition, but Minerva continued working on it for years after his death.

It is said that for scientists to win a Nobel Prize, they had to not only do something amazing and worthy of universal recognition, but they also had to live long enough for the accomplishment to actually be recognized. Perhaps Artemis Fowl died too young for that.

A pair of birds chirped to each other off in a nearby tree, but not for too long, as if they had noticed the old woman by the gravestone and didn't want to disturb her.

"You know," Minerva said quietly, still staring at the stone. "I think I'm still the only one who knows about you being sent into the future." She thought about the memory wipes. "You sure made it hard to prove anything, even to yourself. I believe you though. I believe that you did go into the future to some calamity. No doubt you did your best to help."

A soft wind passed over the ground, ruffling the envelope a little. Minerva bent down with some difficulty, and pushed it a bit deeper into the dirt before straightening back up and leaning back on her walker.

She took a couple of breaths, tired from the exertion, and rested for a moment.

"You saw her, didn't you?" she asked, whispering now. "You saw Holly. I hope… I hope you did something good for her."

Minerva spent a few more minutes there, lost in her own thoughts, remembering the times she spent with the brilliant, intense, but ultimately kind, and utterly amazing, Artemis Fowl.

After a while, she shifted her walker back towards the car, but after she took a step, she stopped, and turned to look back at the tombstone.

"I don't think I have much time left. Arty… I miss you."

She paused, considering the stone one last time.

"Will I see you again?"

 _ **THE END**_

* * *

 _ **A/N:**_ I've been fascinated with the idea of a memory wipe since Eternity Code came out, and it seemed to work nicely with the time travel concepts introduced later in canon, and so, with a little help from St. Augustine, this story happened. Please leave a review! Especially if you enjoyed the story! Even if you want to kill me now! (And I know some of you do.) Till next time. =)


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